some things are just meant to be red with spots

I’ve been thinking about ladybugs lately.

A ladybug doesn’t need to be fixed or changed, a ladybug just is the way a ladybug is. It doesn’t think it’s causing harm, doesn’t know it is misguided, it doesn’t think it is in need of changing. It’s just a ladybug. And what you do, is you decide you either want ladybugs in your garden or you don’t. That’s not a moral judgment, it’s just a compatibility question.

I spent a long time trying to want the ladybug.

There’s a distinction I didn’t understand for a while, one that took losing a friendship to finally land on: accepting someone as they are is not the same as being okay with how they treat you. I think a lot of us get those two things tangled up, because we tell ourselves that if we just love someone hard enough, if we model the right behaviour, if we stay, something will click for them. We think that our presence is proof that another way is possible.

I watched a friend of many years end relationships like she was burning down buildings. Every time, I felt a creeping guilt for staying in her life, like I was endorsing something I knew wasn’t right. But I loved her, I genuinely did. And I think some part of me believed that being her friend, showing up, navigating conflict with care, that this would eventually demonstrate that things didn’t have to go that way and that she could learn a different way to be.

What I didn’t want to admit was that she has never shown nor told me that she is interested in knowing any other way.

Last week, things finally fell apart between us. It culminated in an ending that looked a lot like every other ending I had watched her make. I felt naive, like I should have known better than to expect that I would be treated differently than everyone else had been. Though, what I keep coming back to is that it isn’t naive to expect a friend to try to understand you, it isn’t childish to expect that conflict doesn’t have to mean cruelty. Those are reasonable things to want. The mistake wasn’t in wanting them, the mistake was in waiting for someone to offer them who had never shown me she could.

My empathy has always been the thing I’m most proud of and the thing that gets me into the most trouble. I have a tendency to hold space for other people’s pain so carefully that I forget to hold space for my own. I’ll see the wound underneath someone’s behaviour and love them for it, and I’ll let that love excuse things it probably shouldn’t. I’ll convince myself that if I just stay, if I just care enough, the wound and the behaviour it produces will eventually stop being my problem to absorb.

A new friend said something to me recently that cut right through all of that. They said that accepting people as they are doesn’t mean tolerating being treated badly. It means recognizing that the way someone acts is who they are right now, and asking yourself honestly whether you’re okay being in a relationship with that person, as they actually are, not as they could theoretically become. I wasn’t okay with how things were, I just didn’t want to admit it.

I hadn’t been seeing her clearly. I had been seeing a version of her I hoped she’d grow into, and I had been quietly grieving, for a long time, that she didn’t seem to want to. The end, as painful as it was, did me the favour of making that impossible to ignore. She showed me who she was in the clearest possible way, and what I felt wasn’t just hurt, it was recognition. It was also grieving the potential she had, or maybe just the potential I imagined. But that potential was mine, not hers, and I had to let it go.

Some things are just meant to be red with spots. It’s the truth, not a tragedy. And you’re allowed to decide you don’t want ladybugs in your garden.